The one at Cloan, County Cork, is among these survivors, a structure whose very existence points to a period when the southwest of Ireland was considered serious industrial territory rather than peripheral farmland.

Mine engine houses were built to shelter the steam engines that pumped water from mine shafts, without which most metal ore extraction at any depth would have been impossible. Their characteristic thick stone walls and tall proportions were engineered to support the weight of the beam engine inside, and the Cornish influence on their design was direct; many of the engineers who oversaw their construction came from mining districts in southwest England where the same problems of flooding and extraction had been solved over generations. Cork's mining activity expanded considerably during the nineteenth century, when copper in particular was in high demand, and scattered communities grew up around workings that could fall silent just as quickly when prices dropped or seams ran thin.